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Reviews
| Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm, by Daniel J. Leab. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. 232 pages. $55.00, cloth.
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| The last decade has seen historians of the Cold War becoming increasingly interested in an aspect of the conflict that before had tended to go unnoticed, its cultural dimensions. Some have written about the ways in which American culture helped shape the superpower struggle, in particular, how unstated assumptions about gender, class, and race relations influenced the attitudes and actions of United States government officials. Others have concentrated instead on the ways in which politicians used culture as a weapon with which to wage the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. They hoped to demonstrate the superiority of their nation's way of life by boosting its artists, writers, and musicians to international audiences, sometimes openly, sometimes secretly. This book belongs to the latter genre, and focuses on an artistic medium which arguably has been neglected in previous accounts of the "cultural Cold War" film. In particular, it tells the story of how the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (or, to be more precise, the CIA's semi-independent covert operations arm in the early Cold War period, the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC) covertly initiated, funded, and controlled the production of an animated adaptation of the British author George Orwell's famous 1945 novella, Animal Farm. |
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Ostensibly a children's story about a group of farmyard animals who rise up against their brutal human owner, only to see their revolution then turned into an even more brutal regime ruled by pigs and dogs, Animal Farm was also clearly capable of being interpreted as a satirical allegory about the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, (Its author, while still a convinced socialist when he wrote the book, had become fervently anti-Stalinist during the 1930s after fighting in the Spanish Civil War). British government officials spotted the Cold War propaganda potential of Orwell's fable just a couple of years after its publication, turning it into a comic strip for distribution in South America, Asia, and the Middle East. In the early 1950s, the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination went a step further, indirectly hiring an independent British animation firm, Halas & Batchelor, to make Animal Farm into a feature-length movie. The official hand in the project was disguised because it was thought that the film would be more effective as anti-Soviet propaganda if its foreign audiences believed it was a purely private venture. |
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The story of Animal Farm's animation has been briefly told before, most notably by British researcher Frances Stonor Saunders, in her highly influential 1999 exposé of the CIA's involvement in Cold War cultural patronage, Who Paid the Piper? Daniel Leab's book, however, goes well beyond previous accounts, drawing on hitherto unused document collections, chiefly the papers of producer Louis de Rochemont, to generate an exhaustively detailed history of every phase of the movie's inception, making, and distribution. Hence, there are chapters about Orwell and his book, the early history of the CIA, de Rochemont's career, the securing by the OPC of the rights to film Animal Farm, Halas & Batchelor, the actual production of the movie, its initial reception, and its afterlife. There are also several—although perhaps not enough—illustrations documenting the successive stages of production, including, rather disappointingly, only one still from the movie itself. Along the way, Leab either qualifies or refutes several claims in earlier discussions of the subject, especially Saunders's, for example, playing down the contribution to the operation of E. Howard Hunt (a CIA officer before he later achieved notoriety as one of Richard Nixon's White House "plumbers"), and talking up the reputation of Sonia Orwell, the author's widow. Most importantly, he documents in impressive detail a series of interventions in the production by OPC operatives who wanted Halas & Batchelor to minimize socialist elements in Orwell's allegory, and strengthen its anti-communist message, including imposing a new ending on the story, in which the pigs and dogs eventually faced a second uprising by the other animals. This is significant historiographically, as it reveals just how interfering the CIA could be as a covert cultural patron, while at the same time showing that Orwell's politics were not simply reducible to Cold War-style anti-communism, as some authors have suggested. |
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How useful is this book in the classroom? While essentially a scholarly monograph, and therefore not really suitable for students, instructors might nonetheless find it worthwhile to read as an example of new perspectives on the Cold War, not least because, as Leab himself notes in the penultimate chapter, the movie version of Animal Farm has often been used uncritically in high schools and universities as an aid for teaching the original novel. Students could well stand to benefit in terms of their critical skills and historical knowledge from learning how an apparently apolitical cultural artifact, a movie adaptation of a children's book, was in fact the product of a Cold War covert operation. |
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| California State University, Long Beach |
Hugh Wilford |
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